Thursday, February 15, 2007

Wind Hold

So, with 22" of new snow in the mountains, what would you do to ski some powder runs?

Mike and I headed north to ME at 5:00 am so that we could get in some good runs on the mountain before everything had been skied off. Surprisingly, the roads were in pretty good shape given all of the snow/rain/ice from the day before. After unpacking the truck, changing and grabbing ski gear, we were off to the mountain.

The only trouble with the remnants of the storm was the wind - only two lifts were even running when we arrived, putting all the "freshie" seekers on the same trails. We took a different approach, and decided that it was worthwhile hiking up to ski down some untracked runs...

We took Lift 9 (black line) to the top of Tempest on our first "powder" run, and hiked up (red lines) to Snowbound where we could intersect with Obsession (blue lines). There were only two tracks down in front of us, so I headed down first, and immediately took a digger...I forgot that I needed to lean back in the powder, and that turning was a difficult maneuver! The rest of the run was sweet, but hard work.



On the second adventure, we decided to go a little higher - all the way to the top of Barker Mtn! Looking at the Barker quad at the top, we could understand the wind hold - I wouldn't have wanted to be on it! No on ehad ventured this high, and we skied first tracks down Top Gun to the bottom. I was spent after that - legs were killing me not only from climbing up with all of the gear, but from having to work so hard getting down in all of the snow.


Later in the day, we ventured out on the sleds for a ride. That was really a mis-adventure. With all of the snow, I ended up getting my machine stuck 4 times, and that thing is heavy! We'll go out and try again tomorrow, once some of the trails have been packed down...

1 comment:

claudia said...

Dude, it made me tired just reading this.

We had a great day at Loon....awesome snow, all lifts running, wind not bad. Bought new skis....am going from 166 ccm to 152 cm Dynastars.